Brace yourselves, thirty-something women. Take a deep breath. Put down that BUST Magazine, pause the Sex and the City rerun, remove any sharp objects from the vicinity, and check out what TOTN is about to lay on you. The following is an excerpt from a much discussed piece in the March issue of The Atlantic, answering the age-old question, asked by single women 30 and up:

Is it better to be alone, or to settle?

My advice is this: Settle! That's right. Don't worry about passion or intense connection. Don't nix a guy based on his annoying habit of yelling "Bravo!" in movie theaters. Overlook his halitosis or abysmal sense of aesthetics. Because if you want to have the infrastructure in place to have a family, settling is the way to go. Based on my observations, in fact, settling will probably make you happier in the long run, since many of those who marry with great expectations become more disillusioned with each passing year. (It's hard to maintain that level of zing when the conversation morphs into discussions about who's changing the diapers or balancing the checkbook.) What I didn't realize when I decided, in my 30s, to break up with boyfriends I might otherwise have ended up marrying, is that while settling seems like an enormous act of resignation when you're looking at it from the vantage point of a single person, once you take the plunge and do it, you'll probably be relatively content.

Now, as you might imagine, the sentiment that nixes any dream of Mr. Right and sends you into wedlock with Mr. Good Enough (with really bad breath apparently), has sent the blogs into a frenzy. A frappe. An unprintablyfuriousfroth. In fact, the writing about this article is so good, so witty, so uncompromising, and so filled with energy and rigor, that it certainly doesn't seem that these women would either want, or need to settle, in the least bit.

Regardless, you can set our blog aflame here, but I do suggest that you read the whole article, as her argument isn't simplistic. And of course, post your questions for Lori Gotlieb. (Just questions please, no name calling.)